Who is Amida? What is the Pure Land?

Amida (Amitabha in the original Sanskrit) is the Buddha of Infinite Light and Eternal Life. He is a manifestation of the absolute and supreme reality which is known in Mahayana Buddhism as the Dharmakaya. The Dharmakaya completely transcends time and space but is also, at the same time, to be found in all things and within all sentient beings. It constitutes the fundamental essence of all existence and possesses, pre-eminently, the qualities of absolute wisdom, compassion and bliss. It is the principal aim of Mahayana Buddhism to ultimately attain, for oneself and others, blissful and eternal union with this reality - a state more commonly referred to as Nirvana.

In itself, the Dharmakaya remains unknowable and imperceptible to our ordinary human faculties of sense and cognition. One can only be made aware of it through prajna which is an intuitive power capable of seeing things as they are, undistorted by the influence of ignorance and the myriad passions that afflict us constantly. As only very few people have had the capacity and strength to cultivate prajna through meditation and other practices, the Dharmakaya, in its dynamic compassion, has chosen to manifest itself in a form more readily accessible to the multitudes of suffering and ignorant beings - a form that allows all people to share in its inexhaustible blessings, wisdom and power. This form is Amida Buddha.

Amida Buddha and the Dharmakaya are, in fact, identical, differing only in function. One could say that Amida Buddha is the 'personal' face of the formless Absolute and the only medium through which ordinary beings can ever get to know its treasures. In this sense, the revelation of Amida Buddha to the world can be seen as an act of compassion which serves to illuminate one's path in this turbid world of birth-and death (samsara).

When the Shin Buddhist tradition speaks of Amida, the Pure Land, suffering sentient beings etc., it should not be thought that it is speaking of fundamentally different things. The Buddha and his land of bliss are essentially one and the same reality, these terms merely designating different functions or aspects of the Dharmakaya. Similarly, Amida and we cannot be said to be separated by anything other than an illusion comprising our blind passions such as greed, anger and ignorance. Amida's presence lies within the heart of nature and all living beings. This omnipresence of the supreme reality is also called Buddha-nature and it is only in virtue of this very quality that we share with the Buddha that one can speak of the possibility of attaining final union with him at all. For most people, however, burdened, shackled and blinded as we are by our great karmic weight, the realization of this essential identity will not be possible until our complete enlightenment in the Pure Land at the point of death.

The Light of Amida Buddha is infinite because there is nowhere it does not reach and nothing that it does not penetrate, including the darkest depths of our minds and hearts. This light illuminates the nature of the world and helps us recognize the extent of our profound attachment to our own egos and to the real gulf that, in so many ways, separates us from the Buddha. This light also serves to ferry us safely over the stormy waters of our imperfect existence and to purify us of all the defilements that would ordinarily bar our entry into Nirvana.